it's really something to see how many people are dying for a lack of an encouraging word you know they don't get encouragement and people need so little encouragement it's just unbelievable unbel you know I believe that truth will save the world I believe that so you speak truthfully and you watch what happens and you take your consequences you're a net force for good if you want to be one of the things you do with people who are struggling is you make the simple even simpler because then they can get a toe hold you know like
if they're really barely able to move I had one client you know he had a hard life man he was like 85 he'd fallen off a ladder and broken his neck and they had permanently fuse it so he was basically like this he could hardly move he was so depressed he literally couldn't get out of bed it was awful and he was in chronic pain because of his broken neck and so the first thing I did with him was get him to sit up for like 30 seconds that was it that's where he had to
start you know and after I worked with him when he was in the hospital after 2 weeks he was walking down the hall and able to sit up and read for you know five or 6 minutes and he got out of the hospital he went home and but he had to start with the simplest possible steps and hey man this is the definition of humility in some ways is that you start progressing where you can start well one of the really difficult things to learn when you're down and out is how far you're down because
it's humiliating you know I was Ill recently and when I started to recover I couldn't really button my shirts I had to learn to do that again I had forgotten how to put my hands on keyboard I didn't know where to put my hands I had to learn to type again now I hadn't lost all the knowledge and it came back quite quickly but and the reason I'm saying that is because one of the impediments to people who've really taken a blow in their life is that things have fallen apart around them so badly that
where where they have to start is humiliating even to consider the rule it's a pretty straightforward rule when you want to get back on your feet and the rule is you have to make the task small enough so that you'll do it no matter how small that is I mean one of the things I become well known for is my advice to start by cleaning up your room but I had plenty of clients who they couldn't go home and clean up their room they hadn't cleaned up their room for like 20 years for all sorts
of reasons maybe because every time they did try to do anything POS positive in their family no matter what it was they were immediately punished and undermined and so if they even went home and dared to start cleaning up the room they'd face resistance within the family that was just a manifestation of the 50,000 times they'd been discouraged in the past but also a move that would upset the insanity that characterized the pattern of familial interactions and so actually when if they even made a move to clean up their room what they were doing simultaneously
was confronting the dragon in the family that had made every single person in that household insane for like five generations right so it looks simple it's not bloody simple and so in a situation like that you cut it down so that maybe the first thing they do is clean up like maybe they look inside one drawer and see the mess that's there and just look at it for a minute and think about how they might reorganize it if they were going to when people are very down and out and they decide to make a move
forward in some ways they're facing the whole panoply of problems that confront them in the guise of that single problem right it's all lurking behind it right it's like you know they see the tip of a reptile's tail outside a gigantic closet let's say and they look and they think well that's just the tip of a tail what harm can it do me but it's connected to the whole damn Beast and the advantage to that is that if you make that first step forward you're actually advancing in the face of all that opposition the disadvantage
is that the first task seems so small that you literally have to be on your knees to be humble enough to lower yourself to take that first step you know God is that all I can do I'm so useless you might even be more useless than that because you might fail at it I had lots of clients who would come back you know we'd make a deal that they would do something simple I remember one client is such a comical story in a terrible dark way you know he was an overgrown infant and he was
30 he was still living at home in his you know High School room under the thumb of his mother conveniently for him cuz then he never had to do anything and he had managed to entice some girl into sleeping with him and she got pregnant now he's going to have a son and he had enough sense to come to me and say you know I'm kind of a wasil and I've mucked up my life but maybe I'd like not to destroy this kid so is there something I could do to put myself together so you
know we talked that through we negotiated which is what you do with a client if you're sensible you know you lay out the problem for okay what the hell's wrong with you do you think you have to listen and listen and listen well the person unfolds everything that might be wrong they put all their cards on the table and then you sort through them and you think well some of that's not really the central issue and so you imagine they lay all the cards on the table and then you kind of get rid of 90%
of them it's a symptom it's a symptom yeah yeah it doesn't really bother me now that I've talked about it that doesn't seem key I think I'm really done with that that isn't interesting to me but they'll still have to lay it all out and then you focus on the problem and then the next thing you think is ask them is something this is great General problem solving strategy is okay if this could be better as far as you're concerned what would better look like and then they have to lay their cards on the table
about that so you do the same thing and now you have the diagnosis that's the problem statement and now you have a hypothetical cure let's say and now you need a strategy right and that would be the steps in between the problem and the final destination then you break down the steps and until you find a step that the person will take and you have to do that experimentally so the first step for him was to vacuum the carpet in his in his room and so this is literally what he did he brought the vacuum
it was a standup vacuum he brought that into his room but he only got it to the threshold and then he left it 45° across the door leaning and he walked over it for a whole week and so then he had to come back and tell me you know and he was embarrassed he said you know I got the vacuum cleaner just to the door doorway and I left it there and then instead of bringing it into my bedroom I just you know I put an obstacle in my own path and stepped over it for
a whole week it's a very humiliating thing cuz he knew that his life was on the line and he knew that his son's life was on the line and he knew that he was one useless bastard for not being able to bring that vacuum cleaner into the room you know but the proper interpretation of that in part is well you got the bloody thing out of the closet didn't you you know so what we did was renegotiate this is called technically this is called collaborative empiricism it's a behavioral approach for clinicians and the collaboration is
well as I said what's the problem diagnosis what's the potential solution the person has to be on board with all this right I mean they have to be the people who decide that's the problem you can't enforce that on them they have to discover it for themselves and the same with the solution and the same with the strategies it's like I don't know what's right for you oh listen we can jointly explore what might be the right vision for you and then we can break that down into a strategy but you you have to be
on board with the strategy you have to feel that this is right for you and then we'll say okay well maybe this is a solution why don't you go implement it come back next week after having attempted this let's see how it went you know and sometimes people come back and say well you know that went great and it started me and I did three other things and you know what we seem to be on the right track and sometimes they come back and say nope that didn't work at all like with the vacuum cleaner
and so then you have to think what you do in that situation is make the task smaller if you make the task small enough I've never seen anyone not be able to progress if they made the tasks small enough but you know that can be pretty humiliating now the upside is that once you've take that first step you've look the beast in the face and you'll start progressing not linearly but exponentially in speed so what's cool is that doesn't really matter how small that first step is because it'll start doubling and anything that doubles grows
unbelievably quickly and so that's a very useful thing to know too and that that's true when you're learning anything new it's like you you'll feel like an imposter you'll feel like a fool cuz you are and you'll think I'll never get there and and it might the destination might look very distant but if you take a sufficiently small first step and get the ball rolling you can be cruising along at a pretty good rate generally faster than you'll think what seems to happen when you expose people to small but challenging tasks it does two things
it makes them more skilled because now they're actually dealing with the problem and so they're acquiring the new perceptions and the new behaviors that are Mastery so they're actually expanding their domain of conceptual structures and actions that's both conception and skill but at the same time they're seeing themselves as the actors that can change the direction of their life
